gtmtips

NOTE 30 Oct 2019: I’ve published a new article on outbound link tracking in Google Tag Manager, which makes the whole process much, MUCH simpler. I strongly recommend you read that article instead. Tracking outbound links is important for many. Identifying the exit paths is almost as important as tracking entrances. In this simple #GTMtips post, I’ll show you how to track outbound links with a simple Trigger + Auto-Event Variable combination in the new Google Tag Manager interface. Read More…

With Google Tag Manager, there are a million different ways to make your tagging setup leaner and more flexible. The reason this should be a priority is because the UI isn’t perfect. The more tags you have, the more difficult it becomes to manage your assets. In this #GTMtips post, I show you one of my favorite ways to put your container on a diet. Tip 13: How to create a Generic Event Tag I’ve seen a lot of containers that suffer from the same problem. Read More…

You’ve probably heard of the Konami Code. It’s a cheat code in many Konami games, where the cheat is executed with a sequence of key presses on the keyboard. Since then, it’s become one of the staples of video game folk lore, and many websites, games, and applications have their own easter eggs activated with the Konami code. The sequence of keys is: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A Read More…

In this tip, we’ll take a look at how to leverage a custom first-party cookie to prevent repeat hits of any kind. This is most useful for transactions, since a common problem with Google Analytics (traditional) eCommerce tracking is that a transaction hit is sent again upon subsequent entries to the receipt page, for example using the Back button of the browser. In some cases, and this is not a good practice, a receipt e-mail is sent to the user with a link back to the receipt page, where the transaction is sent over and over again upon entry. Read More…

I’ve written about this before here and here, but this issue remains probably the biggest problem users have when implementing Google Tag Manager. Tip 10: Resolve conflicts with GTM’s listeners The tip title is actually wrong. You’re not fixing Google Tag Manager listeners. Rather, you’re resolving conflicts that other scripts on your page might introduce. GTM’s event listening is based on something called event delegation. Event delegation makes use of the document object model (DOM) and its tree-like hierarchy. Read More…

If you haven’t lived in a barrel, you should know by now that a new version of Google Tag Manager has been released. You can find the new version at http://tagmanager.google.com/, and there’s already a bunch of good articles about the new UI out there. I want to point out two: “Setting up GA via GTM’s new UX” by Krista Seiden, and “Google Tag Manager Refresh – 6 Things You Need to Know” by Jonathan Weber from Bounteous. Read More…

In the new version of Google Tag Manager, auto-event tracking has received a considerable usability upgrade. It might seem quirky at first, especially if you’re used to the old auto-event tracking method, but the logic behind the new setup is brilliant. The most important distinction is that auto-event tracking isn’t something you control with separate tags anymore. Rather, it’s now entirely trigger-driven, meaning you activate and specify the auto-event tracking of your choice using tag triggers (triggers are what ye olde folk used to call rules). Read More…

The User ID is definitely one of the coolest things about Universal Analytics, if used correctly. It might reveal some surprising insights about your visitors, since now you’re not restricted to analysing visitors as just browser or device instances as before, but rather you can build your stories around all the touch points the user might have had on their journey to and through your web properties. With this simple tip, you can extend User ID tracking to return users without them needing to authenticate. Read More…

Here’s a tip on how to avoid a horrible, horrible mistake with Google Tag Manager. Tip 7: Always use .push() with dataLayer When you assign a value to a variable using the equals ( = ) sign, you are actually reallocating the variable to a new value, and the garbage collection system of the runtime environment sweeps the previous value to bit heaven. Let’s put it simply: if you redefine dataLayer after the GTM container snippet, you will break GTM’s proprietary functions. Read More…

This time we’ll take a look at two different, JavaScript-y features of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Callback as a concept should be familiar to anyone who’s ever used a programming language. It’s basically a piece of code that is passed as an argument to some function, so that when this second function has completed, the callback is executed. For web analytics, callbacks are hugely important, since they allow you to impose a firing order for your asynchronous tags. Read More…